Students of Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IITH), bagged top honours in this year’s Samsung Innovation Awards, which had received a total of 22 entries.
The first prize went to Kannan Chandrasekaran for his self-learning bot (an automated programme) that can read through and understand data in an extremely short time and provide responses to questions asked about that data in any form or language, making it easy for users to find information in an easy manner.
V. Sushmitha, Anand Kadu and Sushmee Badhulika won the second prize for developing a low-cost platform for personal healthcare that is enabled by easily available devices such as a smartphone and could be mounted on a wearable device as well. The vision of the team is to enable easily accessible and low-cost healthcare in remote parts of India.
A team comprising G. Hanu Phani Ram, Praveen Kumar Poola and Prasanth Panta were awarded the third prize for their idea of using a smartphone-based method to study cells for early detection of oral cancer.
Big money
The top three winners received prizes worth ₹1.5 lakh, ₹1.2 lakh and ₹80,000 respectively, while the other four finalists received awards of merit from Samsung. The awards were presented by Aloknath De, senior vice-president, Samsung R&D Institute, Bangalore.
Mr. De also addressed the students as part of the awards programme held at the IITH premises on Friday. “Bright young minds of the country need to choose impactful problems, think of innovative solutions and pursue step-by-step implementation. This year too, students of IIT-H have submitted powerful ideas that made shortlisting winners a difficult yet delightful challenge,” he added.